English Intonation

English Intonation

1. Introduction

What is intonation?

Prosodic features

Is English a tone language?

The three Ts: tone, tonicity, tonality

The functions of intonation

Intonation in EFL: transfer and interference

2. Tone: going up and going down

Fall, rise, and fall-rise

Falling and rising tones

Statements

The definitive fall

The implicational fall-rise

More about the implicational fall-rise

Declarative questions

Yes, no and ellptical answers

Independent rises

Questions

Yes-no questions

Independent elliptical questions

Other sentence types

Interjections and greetings

Sequences of tones

Leading and trailing tones

Topic and comment

Open and closed lists

Tone meanings

Generalized meanings of different tones

Checklist of tone meanings

3. Tonicity: Where does the nucleus go?

Basic principles

On a stressed syllable

On or near last word

Content words and function words

Double stress compounds

The old and the new

Information status

Prospective and implied giveness

Focus

Broad and narrow focus

Contrastive focus

Pronouns and demonstratives

Reflexive, reciprocal and indefinite pronouns

Contrastive focus overrides other factors

Contrastive focus on polarity or tense

Nucleus on a function word

Narrow focus: yes-no answers and tags

Other function words that attract the nucleus

Final, but not nuclear

Empty words and pro-forms

Reporting clauses

Adverbs of time and place

Other unfocused adverbs and adverbials

Phrasal verbs

Verb plus adverbial particle

Verb plus prepositional particle

Adverb or preposition

Separated particles

Nucleus on the last noun

Final verbs and adjectives

Accenting old material

Reusing the other speaker's word

Reusing your own words

What is known?

Knowledge: shared, common, and imputed

Difficulty case of tonicity

4. Tonality: Chunking, or division into IPs

Signaling the structure

Choosing the size of the chunk

Chunking the grammar

Vocatives and Imprecations

Heavy noun phrases

Defining and non-defining

Parellel structures

5. Beyond the three Ts

Prenuclear patterns

The anatomy of the prenuclear part of the IP

Finer distinctions of tone

Varieties of fall

Varieties of fall-rise

Varieties of rise

Prenuclear and nuclear tone meaning

Non-nuclear accenting

Lexical stress and downgrading

Two or more lexical stresses

The focus domain

Major and minor focus

Unimportant words at the beginning

Onset on a function word

Further considerations

6. Putting it all together

Describing an intonation pattern: the oral examination

Analysing spoken material

Passages for analysis

Last update at: 2023/09/04 09:27:01